The animal was one of the first predators on land and was only a few mm long.

Its prey were probably early flightless insects and other invertebrates, which it would run down and jump on.

"We know quite a bit about how it lived," said Russell Garwood, a palaeontologist with the University of Manchester, UK.

"We can see from its mouth parts that it pre-orally digested its prey - something that most arachnids do - because it has a special filtering plate in its mouth. So, that makes us fairly sure it vomited digestive enzymes on to its prey and then sucked up liquid food.

“When it comes to early life on land, long before our ancestors came out of the sea, these early arachnids were top dog of the food chain,” said author Dr Russell Garwood, a palaeontologist in the University of Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences.

“They are now extinct, but from about 300 to 400 million years ago, seem to have been more widespread than spiders. Now we can use the tools of computer graphics to better understand and recreate how they might have moved – all from thin slivers of rock, showing the joints in their legs.”

The scientists used the fossils - thin slices of rock showing the animal’s cross-section - to work out the range of motion in the limbs of this ancient, extinct early relative of the spiders.

From this, and comparisons to living arachnids, the researchers used an open source computer graphic program called Blender to create the video showing the animals walking.

Co-author Jason Dunlop, a curator at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, said: “These fossils – from a rock called the Rhynie chert – are unusually well-preserved. During my PhD I could build up a pretty good idea of their appearance in life.

“This new study has gone further and shows us how they probably walked. For me, what’s really exciting here is that scientists themselves can make these animations now, without needing the technical wizardry – and immense costs – of a Jurassic Park-style film.

“When I started working on fossil arachnids we were happy if we could manage a sketch of what they used to look like; now we can view them running across our computer screens.”